Lolita, the septuagenarian nymphet -

Lolita, the septuagenarian nymphet

02/12/2024

Culture • Literature • Books

By HOMERO VIZEU ARAÚJO*

Considerations on the novel by Vladimir Nobokov

“Seven years and seven months!” repeated Humpty Dumpty thoughtfully. “A rather awkward age. If you had asked my advice, I should have said, ‘Stop at seven.’ But it is too late now.” (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There).

In 2025 Lolita reaches 70 years since its release and so as not to clutter up next year with yet another celebration, I decided to anticipate the commentary on the classic that made Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977) very famous, as well as scandalous.

Vladimir Nobokov's novel was published in the second half of 1955 and, as far as I know, became famous in 1958. The narrator is Humbert Humbert, a European writer of outstanding erudition, who left Paris shortly before the outbreak of World War II, settling in the United States. When Humbert begins to tell his story, he is in prison, awaiting trial for having killed a certain writer Clare Quilt, a crime that only occurs at the end of the novel.

The crime, therefore, is not pedophilia, for having sexual relations with a twelve-year-old girl through seduction and coercion, much less for having kidnapped Lolita, the girl Dolores Haze, who is legally his stepdaughter, since the cautious Humbert Humbert married the girl's mother to stay close to Lô/Lola/Lolita. It is one of the many perfidies of a protagonist who conquers the widow Charlotte Haze to have access to her daughter.

The misguided Charlotte, already married to her erudite heartthrob, soon discovers Humbert's diary that reveals her husband's attraction to her daughter; distraught after reading it, she accuses Humbert and leaves the house only to be run over and die crossing the street. After that, the stepfather feigns sadness at the funeral and sets off in search of his stepdaughter, who is on a vacation program. The predator picks up the girl and sets off on a tour of the USA, far from the Haze address, but HH reveals nothing about her mother's death. Lolita only discovers that she is an orphan after becoming her stepfather's lover.

Next comes the second part of the book, with HH dragging his prey across American territory on a journey that follows the couple's first night together: for a year, between August 47 and August 48, they travel across America in a Haze family sedan. Sharing motel rooms, cabins, hotels, etc., the exciting and criminal arrangement allows HH to fulfill his pedophile fantasies, admitting from the beginning the fights and disagreements that he recognizes are inevitable in such an abusive and tense scene.

The narrator summarizes the journey from East to West to East in America and ends the chapter by claiming that “our long journey” had only served to sully, with a winding trail of slime, that intense and beautiful country, dreamy and confident. The malice is even exuberant in its self-satisfaction, although it is included in the present situation in which HH’s statement (in prison) is tinged with some melancholy.

The following excerpt is a summary of the novel’s complex rhetoric, which I reproduce here in the beautiful translation by Jório Dauster: “We drove eastwards, I more devastated than strengthened by having satisfied my passion, and Lô radiant with health, her hips still as narrow as a young boy’s, although she had added two inches to her height and ten pounds to her weight. We had been everywhere. In truth, we had seen nothing. And I am surprised today to think that our long journey only served to defile with a winding trail of slime that immense and beautiful country, dreamy and confident, which even then in retrospect was nothing more to us than a collection of tattered maps, torn tourist guides, old tires and Lô’s sobs in the middle of the night – of every night, of every night – as soon as I pretended to be asleep.” (p. 178)

The narrator, more fragile than strong, praises Lolita's health and goes into detail about her weight and size, reinforcing her physical and sexual appeal. They have been everywhere and seen nothing. The dazzled assessment that rehearses the commonplace about America and its promises, which is tarnished, rushes in the same long period to the desolation of maps and guides in poor condition that ends in the poignant cry of the orphaned child at the mercy of the fury of the relentless, although allegedly fragile, narrator.

In this context between physical dazzlement and emotional sordidness, the reader would have to return to the beginning of the paragraph to compare the two Lolitas in question, the radiant one and the sobbing one, to also reach the ambivalence of the report of the beautiful country that is reduced to maps, guides and tires composing the desolate land for Humbert's degraded idyll. Between the promises of dream and trust and the banal landscape in which the industrial waste (tires) of way of life is welcomed. The final (disgusting? embarrassing?) moment of HH hearing the girl's sobs while pretending to sleep is a masterstroke to provoke and accuse the reader who comes to identify with the charming, iconoclastic and abject narrator.

At the beginning of the chapter, this ambivalent Wonderland of America was already compared to Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, in which the girl Alice also endures her share of arbitrariness and authoritarianism, which is also a type of learning experience. We will return to the game of quotations and parody later on.

The Abuser in the Rye

The exuberant rhetoric that Nabokov constructs in the voice of his protagonist oscillates between histrionic, often ironic but also pathetic, not to mention the self-indulgence that tries to justify the unjustifiable. It is a procedure that explores the reader's discomfort and adherence, which helps to define the literary complexity at hand.

Humbert will make at least two more long trips driving his car through the highways Yankees, in the first of them he will be abandoned by his Lolita and in the second he goes armed with a revolver in search of the man who took her. A crucial part of the novel is, therefore, on the road, exploring the travel plots that have been present in American literature since at least the classics Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which travel along roads and rivers to define a pattern of nonconformity against adult authority.

In the 1950s it will appear On the road, by Jack Kerouac, proposing the beatnick conception of transgression. But this contemporary of the 1950s, Kerouac, demonstrates verbal lack of control and uneven rhythm, not to mention improvisation, which is the opposite of the very constructed and cerebral effects achieved by HH. As if Nabokov were exploring the theme on the road in a parodic and perverse way by subjecting American youth to the malicious, sexual and intellectual designs of the European character soaked in literary references, in other words, the innocence of America being exploited, on the road, for high culture in the service of the sexual abuse of minors.

Nabokov admired Salinger's prose, whose Catcher in the Rye, from 1952, precedes Lolita. I am not being original, I imagine that some volumes have already commented on how much Salinger's narrator character, the young Holden Caufield, acts in terms opposite to Nabokovian perversity. In the famous scene that gives its name to Salinger's novel, Holden embodies the figure who seeks to save children and young people in a field of rye, beyond which lies the desolation of adult life with its hypocritical arrangements and insane commodification, in the terms of American way of life.

Now, Humbert Humbert is the patriarchal authority itself in a perverted disposition, who uses his status as stepfather to destroy Lolita's childhood. He acts to disintegrate the dynamics of childhood and adolescence, never to protect it, hence his candidacy as, I would say, the abuser in the rye. Reading in contrast Salinger's prose, which explores New York orality intensely, with Nabokov's prose, also with an extraordinary oral rhythm, is an experience that reveals the ambition of post-war American literature.

But the difference in perspectives is thought-provoking. Lolita is also a dark and comical parody of the libertarian pretensions present in Kerouac or Salinger, which is not the same as saying that it is a conscious parody. The idea that the work depends on the author's intentions is very naive; artistic forms, materialized in text, achieve great autonomy in relation to the artists' consciousness.

Still in that possible approach with On the road, chapter 28 of Lolita, already nearing the end of the book, opens like this: “There I was again on the road, again jolted by the old blue sedan, again alone.” HH hits the road after finally receiving a letter from Lolita after two years without news, he goes to find her but takes a gun to kill the person who took her from his clutches, who he mistakenly assumes is her current husband. The original reads “I was again on the road, again at the wheel of the old blue sedan, again alone.” Lolita is now 17 years old, married and pregnant, and signs the letter as Lolita “(Mrs. Richard F. Schiller)”.

Here is another wink from Nabokov: F. Schiller, besides Lolita's American husband, could also be Friedrich Schiller, the famous German author, 18th-19th century, who wrote the renowned “The Aesthetic Education of Man”. Could this be another erudite joke about the type of sentimental/sexual education/demolition to which Lolita was subjected? This macabre humor gains stronger flavor if we remember that Lolita will die in childbirth, just as HH dies of a coronary thrombosis shortly before her, in prison.

It is worth remembering that Nabokov is a descendant of an aristocratic and liberal Russian family, who left for Europe following the 1917 revolution. After graduating from Cambridge, he became an exile in continental Europe and left from there for the United States on the eve of World War II. This double exile undoubtedly contributed to sustaining a distant and, in his case, politically conservative perspective that considered the Russian revolution a tragic farce, Freud a charlatan, etc. He had a refined education and was bilingual, Russian and English; in the XNUMXs, settled in the United States, he already wrote his novels in English. That his Lolita Whether it is in fact included among the American novels is also a testament to imperial America's ability to harness talent and, ultimately, appropriate it. To what extent the book tensions and/or integrates with some American literary tradition seems to me an interesting debate.

Humbert Humpty

Here I return to chapter 3, the opening paragraph of which is quoted below. It can be considered a transitional chapter, which brings to a close the pedophile journey that took place in 1947-8. Below, therefore, is the opening of chapter 3, the closing of which is Lolita's atrocious sobs heard by Humbert in the previous quote.

“She had entered my world, in the dark and shadowy Humberland, with impetuous curiosity, examining it with a shrug of cheerful displeasure; and now she seemed ready to escape it with something like the purest repugnance. She never flinched under my caresses, and a shrill, “Oops, what are you doing?” was all I deserved in return for my efforts. To the wonderland I offered her, my silly little girl preferred the most banal films, the most sickening ice creams. And to think that between a hamburger and a Hamburger she invariably inclined, with icy precision, to the former! There is nothing more atrociously cruel than a beloved child. Did I mention the name of the motel bar we visited a little while ago? It was called, I swear, The Frigid Queen. With a half-sad smile, I nicknamed her My Frigid Princess. But she did not see what was melancholy in the joke.” (168-9)

The opening is dark (black and shadowy) and it isn't, since the pun Humberland is playful. The mix of dark and playful, aggression and humor, summarizes the progress of the whole in each paragraph; it is a literary form worked in detail. The calm and relentless assessment reveals that HH is fully aware that the girl submits reluctantly and disgustedly. She entered the game with jovial displeasure and now wants to escape Humberland with something close to strong disgust, which for Humbert is bad but far from crucial.

He will continue to subject and abuse, of course, even as the repugnance grows. More seriously, he appeals to complacent generality (“nothing more atrociously cruel, etc.”), as if he were dealing with the reactions of a fickle child being disturbed in the park or in the classroom and not in the bedrooms under his stepfatherly authority. But the sentence about Lolita’s dissatisfaction, who reacts in a childish way and prefers, in her naive consumerist palate, banal films and very sweet delicacies, opens with an explicit reference to Alice in Wonderland, therefore echoing that Humberland from the opening of the paragraph.

The translation has abandoned the pun that is blatant in the original (Humberland/wonderland), perhaps a somewhat forced solution would be “in the black and shadowy country of the Humbervilles”.

The whole, with the echo of Carroll, sounds even more malicious, with Humberland and wonderland suggesting that this American Alice kidnapped by male desire could let herself go and discover various charms under the dominion of her sober and perfectly normal stepfather HH. The pun reappears in the cannibalistic line between Hamburger/Humburger and the apotheosis of Lolita's sexual indifference or repulsion occurs with the association between the frigid Queen and the frigid Princess Lolita. I also think that in this oscillation between queen and princess there remains the echo of Alice and her adventures; if so, once again the asexual Alice renders more malice to the sexual adventures to which the prisoner Lô is subjected.

But the associations don't stop there, because Alice faces, in Through the Looking Glass and the that Alice found there, Humpty Dumpty, among other creatures that can range from playful to kind or even evil. Humpty Dumpty is the height of pretension and authoritarianism, although derived from a saying/children's song in which he falls from grace.

As a pretentious egg, he dialogues and contests the girl Alice until he reaches the famous passage: “- But “glory” does not mean “a devastating argument” objected Alice.

“When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty scornfully, “it means exactly what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things.”

“The question,” replied Humpty Dumpty, “is who is in charge. That is all.”

This peculiar semantic theory may be questioned by linguists, but it is also an objection to formalism that fails to recognize the historical and political dimension of language. In Nabokov's punning paragraph, there would be yet another hidden phonetic play, linking the two executioners: Humbert Humbert and Humpty Dumpty. Both are arbitrary and pretentious, adding yet another of the countless parodic references that Nabokov, in a Joycean manner, weaves into his narrative.

It is worth remembering that Nabokov was proud of having translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian in 1923, undoubtedly one of the first translations of the book into that language. He was in Germany under grotesque inflation and the five dollars he received constituted a considerable sum. Reinforcing the associative web, I think it is worth mentioning Alice's final reflection upon leaving the chapter, commenting on Humpty Dumpty.

After being summarily dismissed, the girl continues: “But she cannot help saying to herself: ‘Of all the unsatisfactory people…’” (and she repeated it much louder for the pleasure of having such a long word to say) “…of all the unsatisfactory people I ever met…” In the crucial paragraph about Lolita’s dissatisfaction and frigidity under sexual duress, Alice’s judgment of Humpty Dumpty’s swaggering arrogance illuminates with renewed cruelty Humbert’s melancholy and perverse pretensions. I find it hard to deny the literary density achieved, although the intellectual exhibitionism in the construction can also become a tic.

It has been recorded in more than one statement that Nabokov considered the Reverend Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll is a pseudonym) one of the most notable nymphet photographers he had ever heard of. Dodgson's photographs of girls in the nymphet state, an important and talented photographer, are indeed suggestive and controversial, although research into Lewis Carroll's life has not found any major evidence that he broke with Victorian standards of modesty. With his sharp wit, Nabokov stated: "I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert."

The romance Lolita opens with a preface, let's say, clinical, written by John Ray Jr., a psychiatrist who reveals the supposed original title: “Lolita or The Confession of a White Widower”. In English, the title already has explicit euphony and assonance: A confession of a white widowed male. The preface, in addition to providing relevant information about upcoming characters, is a hilarious satire of the good therapeutic intentions in the peculiar version of semi-Freudian and behaviourist psychology in force in post-war America.

The indulgent and well-thinking psychiatrist already tries to promote himself in the first paragraph by reminding us that Lolita probably came into his hands because he, JR Jr., “had recently received the Poling Prize for a modest work (Do the senses make sense?), in which certain perversions and morbid states had been studied.”

After several considerations, John Ray Jr.'s conclusion is a masterpiece of conformity and edifying effort, largely so as not to offend the moral sensibilities of any reader: “Lolita should make all of us – parents, educators, social workers – commit ourselves with even greater diligence and vision to the task of raising a better generation in a safer world.” (p. 7).

The preface still bears the date on which it was supposedly written: August 5, 1955. In the McCarthyist decade in which the horror of the atomic bomb had been normalized, the appeal for world security has sarcastic echoes, beyond the intentions of the author Nabokov, who, moreover, knew very well that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had occurred on August 6 and 9, 1945.

Be that as it may, there is another canonical American novel that would be published in 1969, Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth, which is also preceded by a text by a psychiatrist. In portnoy the porn provocation is already present in the title and name of the narrator character, who uses popular names for sexual acts and members. Once again the confession is leaked in a very stylized and polished oral record to account for the sexual experience of young Portnoy, who also frequents New York, like Holden Caulfield, but with other interests conditioning the journey.

The first-person account, with narrators in the situation, is a hallmark of North American classics, from Ishmael in Moby Dick, or Huck Finn. Let them be introduced by psychiatric professionals at the opening of Lolita and Portnoy's Complaint is a sign of the times, as well as being a joke about the therapeutic nature of confessions in the doctor's office. Not to mention that Holden Caulfield, when he tells his story, is under medical supervision in a sanatorium, after a breakdown. Between imaginary fields of rye, erudite pedophile journeys and masturbatory youth, there is a first-person canon that explores the technique of self-exposure in a humorous and grotesque way. The whole can be read as an experience somewhere between criticism, farce and documentary, revealing “that immense and beautiful country, dreamy and confident” where the refined European Humbert Humbert managed to fulfill his confessed and unspeakable desires.

*Homer Vizeu Araujo is a full professor at the Institute of Letters at UFRGS.

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